Journey from an RJ to a Management Consultant

“Do not worry that your life is turning upside down, how do you know the side you are used to is better than the one to come – Rumi” is one of the quotes that Ipshita has lived by throughout her career and has been her motivation while dealing with overwhelming challenges that came her way.

Ipshita Saha, who worked as a Radio Jockey in All India Radio while being a student in 10th grade is today a Management Consultant in Digitytics.ai and has over eight years of extensive cross-functional experience spanning operations, business strategy consulting, product development, marketing & consumer research across various industries. She is also an alumnus from IIM Ahmedabad and one of the mentors that GoCrackIt is proud to have on board.

Experience as a Radio Jockey

Ipshita worked as a part-time Radio Jockey at the age when many of us just danced to the tunes of school, grades and tuition classes. “I didn’t even know what Management Consulting was at that time”, she says, but she surely had started building her management skills that today has made her a manager with integrity and a vision.

While in broadcasting, there was diversity in her work since she was doing English programs, Hindi programs and also live programs. This led to learning of various basic management elements like preparation, structuring of content and focusing on distilled communication and thinking on your feet.

Skills that helped to get a job at Boston Consulting Group(BCG)

“Exposure, Hard Work and a Structured way of thinking.” These three things were a major part of getting shortlisted and getting through the interview. Hard work came from the innumerable case preps and a thorough reading of whitepapers. According to Ipshita, these whitepapers helped her understand how to structure information and also helped her gain industry insights.

Before BCG, Ipshita also worked in operations in ITC for four years. So, the fact that she had done broadcasting, appeared in multiple Olympiads, had also done theatre and event organization in college, is from where the exposure factor comes from.

Key Learnings and Experience at BCG

According to Ipshita, whenever people are subjected to a problem, no matter how challenging, they try to jump to conclusions and bring out a solution as fast as they can rather than deeply analyzing and identifying the problem itself. This is one of the factors that impedes students from being shortlisted. We need to focus our energy to understand the problem from all angles. Build a hypothesis, ask the right set of questions, structure your thoughts and create a crystal-clear picture of the problem in your mind. The solution then follows accordingly. Working at BCG taught her to structure and present her thoughts in such a way that is more committed towards problem identification before jumping to conclusions and proposing an answer.

Jobs in Management Consultancy post Covid-19

The term ‘post Covid-19’ was very uncertain. It might have meant a few months or one to two years. Whatever the time be, one of the key things that comes into notice is that across industries the appetite for technology is increasing. Companies are holding hands with technology and have started experimenting with the ways they operate. Taking this into consideration pure strategy consulting jobs won’t suffice. However, to land with a job as a Management Consultant one has to keep polishing their knowledge capital. This is because companies will be focusing on running operations, and as a management consultant your knowledge about strategy and technology mix and its implementation will be in demand.

Career Journey in one word: Exploration

When asked to sum up her journey in one word, Ipshita replied, “Exploration” and this is reflected in the kind of work and projects that she has undertaken over the years. Apart from ITC and BCG, she also worked in advertising for a short period of time, where she had the opportunity to work for one of the most exciting projects of her career. As she recalls, “We got a project from a media conglomerate and they wanted to find out the media consumption behaviour of the youth. It was the year 2016 and YouTube as a channel was famous for web series and short videos with their major audience being the youth. Our clients had content for youth but it was still a segment that they couldn’t capture as much. So, I would actually go to the office and go through different short videos, web series that were there on YouTube. So that was amazing fun, obviously there was a technical aspect to it because we had to distil all of this information into a structured format.”

There are many people in the world that have great careers, but having a ‘me’ time is a part of it. Ipshita spends her spare time reading. It is the hobby which has stayed with her for a very long time. One of her favorite book “Stumbling upon happiness by Daniel Gilbert” is something she advises everyone to read.

Exploration, as she says, the word in itself means that her journey hasn’t stopped yet, with a multidimensional experience and a thirst to always try something new, the journey goes on and learning never stops.

– Article by Rajasi Gawande